How to set up IIS 7 application pool identity correctly?

Question

Having deployed my website to IIS7.5 I found one strange behaviour: when application pool identity is left to be ApplicationPoolIdentity by default (as recommen

Answer 1

iispool\appPoolName account are called virtual accounts & were added to Windows 2008. The idea goes that they aren't really accounts in the true sense. What they allow is enhanced security between processes using the base account.

Many services on your machine use networkService, a built in account with network access. Because of this, if an attacker were to exploit one of those services, any other process running under the same account would be accessible. Virtual accounts, such as those used by IIS prevent this by appearing as different accounts, whilst still being the same account - your asp.net app is still technically running as networkservice & granting this account access to things shoudl still work. This also means if you need to access network resources, the iispool accounts would do so as networkservice does & use the machines domain account.

If you are accessing a remote sql server, this is the account you should add to allow access from your web server. I wouldn't advise using impersonation, unless you really really need to see who the user is on the SQL server. Your app security is simpler if you leave it off.

as to why your injections aren't working, it could be any of your dependencies failing. if controllerA is injected with ClassB which in turn is injected with ClassC & that class fails to have ClassD injected, then the whole chain fails. I've had that happen & it took a while to realise it was something so removed from what I was looking at.